Unofficial news and tips about Google

May 19, 2010

How to Play WebM Video on YouTube

If you want to try WebM, the open video format released by Google, you first need a browser that supports it. For now, WebM is not supported in a stable version of a browser, but you can install a Firefox nightly build or an Opera build. I download Opera 10.54, which is more stable than the nightly builds of Firefox.

Click on a video and you'll notice that YouTube no longer uses Flash or H.264. There's even a messages that makes the video player more cluttered: "HTML5 * WEBM".

YouTube converted a small percentage of videos to WebM. A search for [web] returns 4,610 WebM videos, while millions of other videos aren't available yet in this format. Check Opera's blog post for more information about the WebM format, embedding WebM videos and more examples of WebM videos.

I don't get what the point of the exercise is if we have to get proprietary flash in order to play WebM content within a HTML5 (draft) and WebM enabled browser. Sure Google gets to give Apple the finger via MPEG-LA. But the internet isn't any freer or accessible as long as we still have to run these videos via flash and Adobe remains the guardian of all media on the net.

ok, I got this, and all it did was seriously screw up my PC. I am royally pissed.I uninstalled, and it's still messed up. All I ever get with youtube vits now is the spinning buffer symbol, except now it's sort of skewed and off-center as it spins. did this thing permanently mess up my PC? How do I fix this?